GODFATHER GOVERNMENT: A WAY OF LIFE IS NOT A SCANDAL

By Carolyn Baker

March 18, 2007

Don't you get the idea I'm one of those goddamn radicals.
Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system.

Al Capone

Behind every great fortune, there is a crime.

Lucky Luciano

Historians study not only the past but using their analysis of the past, speculate about how the future might unfold. However, historians are not psychics; we can’t predict the exact occurrence of events with specificity, but we can analyze past and current events and conjecture likely future scenarios based on those events. In 1937, during the German Third Reich, historian Robert Brady wrote The Spirit And Structure Of German Fascism, one of the most incisive books of the twentieth century, now out of print and deemed “irrelevant” to contemporary events by most traditional historians. In his last chapter, “The Looming Shadow Of Fascism Over The World,” Brady hypothesized that corporatist influences would ultimately come to dominate many of the governments of the modern world, including and especially, the United States.

Certainly, America’s triumphant emergence from World War II and the subsequent institutionalization of the military-industrial complex established significant components of incipient fascism, as throughout the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency fomented anti-Communist hysteria and right-wing coups d’etat around the world. Meanwhile, at home, McCarthyism gave way to consumerism on steroids and the triumph of the American corporation on all fronts—a feat that had its roots in an obscure Supreme Court technicality in the decision, Santa Clara vs. Union Pacific Railroad in 1886, which declared that corporations were “persons” who had the same “civil rights” guaranteed freed slaves under the Fourteenth Amendment.

While most presidential administrations of the twentieth century gave lip service to government regulation of corporations, a new era dawned in the eighties with Reagan’s “war on government.” It was the beginning of the dismantling of government regulation of industry in America, and it was further exacerbated by a momentous Executive Order signed by Reagan. Executive Order 12615 required departments and agencies to “establish full and ambitious privatization goals.” It also created the Office of Privatization within the Office of Management And Budget to oversee the program and established an independent Commission on Privatization to study and recommend opportunities for privatization within the federal government.

According to Chapter 17 of Webster Tarpley’s The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, Sr. and the research of Catherine Austin Fitts, Reagan’s Executive Order meant that private corporate contractors would no longer have to be accountable for the work they did nor how they used the money allocated to them. As a result, an opportunity for a black budget was created in which government money would be spent without the oversight of Congress and the American people. Clearly, this was a disastrous recipe for fraud and corruption to become standard operating procedure in the federal government.

Concurrently, the CIA was secretly financing the illegal Contra War in Nicaragua with cocaine trafficking, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was operating, a member of Senator Kit Bond’s staff told Catherine Austin Fitts, as a criminal enterprise. More recently art has imitated life in a "Sopranos" episode which mirrored HUD’s corrupt activities in South Central Los Angeles—the illumination of which by Fitts, and later From The Wilderness, precipitated the dirty tricks unleashed against her long before the "Sopranos" became an HBO series.

Enter the Democratic Clinton Administration which gave us NAFTA and made U.S. corporations sovereign domestically and internationally as globalism was born and its proponents championed the demise of nations and the supremacy of corporations. It was during that administration, not a Republican one, that the criminal enterprise we call the federal government came down on Fitts and nearly destroyed her.

Can anyone find a more stellar symbol of corporate dominance than that infamous glass skyscraper in Houston, formerly occupied by the Enron Corporation? Catherine Austin Fitts has superbly connected the dots between the egregious criminality of Enron, the Harvard Endowment, and one of the federal government’s principal contractors, CSC-DynCorp. Last year, with the conviction of former Enron golden boys, Jeff Skillings and Ken Lay--Lay’s death, not withstanding, investigative journalist, Greg Palast, unleashed a scathing expose of Enron throughout alternative media.

With the convictions of Lay and Skillings, Palast seized the opportunity to muckrake enough dirt on Enron to fill its former Houston headquarters from basement to rooftop. So too have Peter Elkind and Bethany Mc Lean in their fabulous 2006 documentary, “The Smartest Guys In The Room”; however, what Palast and the filmmakers both failed to address and what Mike Ruppert covered judiciously in Crossing The Rubicon, was Enron’s involvement in moving and laundering massive quantities of drug money through its Enron Online trading company. From the research of Palast, Elkind, and Mc Lean, it is obvious that Enron cooked its books and used the smoke and mirrors of “Mark To Market” accounting to book profits out of thin air, but none of them can explain where Enron acquired the money to actually run its corporation while selling worthless stock and paving the way to financial oblivion for its investors and employees. The missing link in the Enron story is drug profits, but Mike Ruppert caught that link, as did Catherine Austin Fitts in her many articles revealing the Enron-Harvard-Citibank-DynCorp connection.

Palast nailed Choice Point, an enormous data-gathering empire which helped rig the 2000 election and has more recently been deeply involved in assisting the National Security Agency in spying on innocent American citizens. Calling Choice Point a “private KGB”, Palast writes: By ‘private KGB,’ I mean ChoicePoint, Inc., the Atlanta company that keeps over 16 billion records on Americans which it sells to the FBI, Homeland Security and, through a bit of a slip-up, identity thieves. They are watching you because George and Dick don't have time to track everyone in America (and that would be illegal, to boot), so Choice Point does it. Then turns over the electronic you -- cross-matched profiles of voting registration, your DNA info and who knows what else -- for a price.”

When one thoroughly digests the machinations of corporations like CSC-DynCorp, Enron, Halliburton, and Choice Point, it is axiomatic that whatever we have come to call “the government” is now virtually indistinguishable from private corporations—entities which are in themselves criminal syndicates. As Fitts for years has taken great pains to point out, when local communities of individuals do not control government databases, mind boggling corruption and exploitation of innocent citizens is inevitable simply because there is no fiduciary transparency. This is one of the principal arguments for local, not national, solutions; the more centralized systems become, the greater the potential for abuse. Conversely, the more de-centralized systems are, the more illumined and amenable to local monitoring they are likely to be.

From hindsight we now know that 9-11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government not only for the purpose of capturing the last remaining recoverable drops of oil on earth, but also as a pretext for sanctioning a pandemic of corruption within the federal government and corporations in the name of “national security” as well as the gradual but unprecedentedl shredding of the Constitution and the civil liberties it ensures. Subsequently, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq corporatized those countries to such an extent that it would be more appropriate for them to fly the flags of Halliburton and Bechtel than the colors of their respective nations. Add to this the Bush Administration’s admission that billions of dollars designated for the Iraq War cannot be accounted for. Why are we not surprised?

At home in the U.S. the Bush regime muscled through Congress its Medicare Reform Bill and firmly placed American healthcare in the hands of its cronies and lobbyist friends from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, spiking the costs of prescription medications and health insurance. At the same time, millions of working and middle class individuals who have no health insurance and who are being squeezed to death by the costs of mortgage payments, childcare, and simply putting food on the table in their households, find themselves decimated by medical bills, losing their jobs, or simply getting in over their heads financially with the credit cards they frantically use to “rob Peter and pay Paul.” But the Godfather Government saw this coming and found the “losses” incurred by Citibank, Chase, and other cronies of the banking industry intolerable, thereby making certain that the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 would sail through Congress with only a whisper of opposition.

The consequences of this legislation is now savaging the lives of countless middle and working class Americans. In fact, we must now ask a logical question: Will the grinding albatross of personal debt engender a massive pool of slave laborers in America who see no alternative to “working off their debt”? Economist Paul Krugman articulated a similar perspective in his New York Times 2005 article, "Debt Peonage". In any event, the gargantuan amounts of personal and collective debt in the United States will be a pivotal ingredient in the evisceration of the nation’s economy—a phenomenon impeccably documented by Kevin Phillips in American Theocracy: The Peril And Politics Of Radical Religion, Oil, And Borrowed Money In The Twenty-First Century. The progression of the demise is likely to be protracted rather than cataclysmic, with periodic crises, such as the housing bubble and a resultant credit bubble, heating up the subtle but yet very perceptible trial by fire.

In 2005, Business Week Online reported George W. Bush’s signature of the May 5 memo entitled “Assignment Of Function Relating To Granting Of Authority For Issuance Of Certain Directives: Memorandum For The Director Of National Intelligence.” In the document, Bush assigned intelligence czar, John Negroponte, the task of waiving Securities and Exchange Commission rules, established in 1934, pertaining to accounting disclosures by publicly-traded companies. As a result of no longer needing to reveal financial information in the name of national security, the cloning of Enron, having been in process for several years, was sealed. Instead of being required to disclose valid accounting ledgers, U.S. corporations have now been given carte blanche to maintain fiduciary legerdemain. Therefore, I must ask: How can any sane human being persist in believing that a legitimate government exists in the United States?

But we have a Congress, you may argue—and a Democratically-controlled one at that. Yes, and they have spent the past two months arguing about how to manage a war that the nation was lied into, rather than confronting the lies and turning off both the faucet of funding incessantly requested by the emperor and the deluge of profits flowing to military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the so-called progressive Democrats continue to perform as they have in the face of Bush’s most recent escalation of the war, they will confirm what any observer with two brain cells to rub together already knows: That the Democrats ARE the problem because of their insipid enabling of the fascist regime in the White House.

How many times has Congress cratered since September 11, 2001? Many more times than I have hours in the day to spend documenting them. In the past six years, we’ve all asked why. Post-9-11, we attributed Congressional loss of spine to the fear of the administration and political pressure to placate it. What is now being revealed almost daily, however, is the extent to which the tentacles of mobsters like Jack Abramoff and the K Street crowd reach into the halls of Congress. Kit Bond’s staffer was wrong only about one thing when he said that HUD was being run as a criminal enterprise: What is left of the entire former government of the United States is now more than ever being run as a criminal enterprise.

Perhaps even after all I have written here, you still believe you have a government. Whether you do or not, I’m fairly certain that when you read Catherine Austin Fitts’ exhaustive exposé on government-corporate corruption, you will no longer entertain the delusion that your so-called government is anything but institutionalized organized crime disguised as a government, or rather, empire, now teetering on the precipice of collapse.

In a shorter but succinct analysis of Godfather Government entitled "The American Tapeworm", Fitts provides a lucid but thorough explanation of the nuts and bolts of the criminal enterprise, not only within the United States, but how it is playing itself out globally, and specifically in Iraq.

Whether or not it has become clear to economists looking through rose-colored glasses, it is painfully obvious to the American consumer that the nation has entered a recession that promises to be long, deep, and most likely, global. While images of 1929 may haunt us, the gathering economic storm clouds are not likely to result in a sudden cataclysm, but rather a long, protracted, painful impoverishment on myriad levels. "This state of affairs," says Fitts, "can go on as long as it can be financed. Hence, as long as America can continue to export dollars, export Treasury bills and mortgage backed and other federally supported credit, and lead in global organized crime and warfare, a negative return economy can continue."

If you think your “government” is going to do anything to protect and support its citizens in the wake of endless imperial conquest, a housing market that is now toast, worsening global warming, global pandemics, natural disasters, massive food shortages, unprecedented outbreaks of violence and unrest, rates of unemployment that will dwarf those of the Great Depression, debt peonage, rapidly diminishing water supplies and a rotting infrastructure, as well as trainloads of worthless U.S. dollars, then the price you will pay for your gullibility and denial will be horrific. If you want to see what your “government” thinks of you and will do for you, think Katrina. Think the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s in this country when tens of thousands of human beings died while your government stood by and did nothing—and still is.

The only thing the members of your government care about is the colossal transfer of wealth—the financial coup d’ état that is in progress that will devastate you and your family economically and produce unparalleled profits for the gangsters you vote for. Absurdly, mainstream and even progressive media refer to eruptions of pervasive criminality in the federal government as ”scandals” revealing their inability to grasp the systemic disintegration of the rule of law in America and the reality that names like Abramoff, Libby, Gonzales, Walter Reed Hospital, are not scandals but symptoms of a disintegrating, rotting empire . Like AIDS victims suffering from incessant episodes of pneumonia, anemia, skin lesions, and other horrible ailments, none of which are their diagnosis but rather symptoms of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, epidemic criminality in high places is systemic and inherent in a fascist empire in the throes of collapse. To address the symptom as the disease merely facilitates the disease's progression and exacerbates the resultant suffering.

The driving force of fascism, and indeed all empires, is amoral sociopathy about which I wrote in my recent article "The Science Of Evil And Its Use For Political Purposes". Like AIDS or any other virulent syndrome, its symptoms manifest relentlessly but are systemic and therefore cannot effectively be addressed on the level of the symptom--the principal reason why political action, itself contaminated by the syndrome, provides bandaids and chicken soup, but is incapable of extricating itself from the syndrome.

To understand this is to stop referring to the criminal syndicate posing as the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches as “government” at all. To grasp this is to stop responding with naive, jaw-dropping surprise in the face of systemic corruption and to relinquish all hope that some other party or some more innovative politician will make it all better. There IS no government of the United States, but only corporations and centralized financial systems.

Therefore, it is now time to ponder how you will take care of yourself and your loved ones in the face of deepening, brutal, merciless, collapse (whether sudden or protracted), in an economy hollowed out and stripped bare, attended as corroding empires always are, by totalitarian management of the unruly and impoverished masses.

In 1937 Robert Brady called the corporate world view “organized piracy” and asked:

Is there any fundamental difference in appreciation of human values or in general outlook on life between a stockbroker and a pirate?…What on the open seas is thought of as an outlaw and ‘piratical’ raid of group on group is in another setting played as a legitimate game in which each man is pitted against every other man for all he can ‘get by with’ short of a snarl with criminal law.

This is fascism, and your “government” is already there. The wildly popular “Sopranos” HBO series has gone the way of all mini-series, now appearing several times a week in re-run status. Its greatest contribution to the culture, in my opinion, was its mirror image of the chicanery of empire, reminding us that the "Sopranos" of government have never gone away; in fact, they’re just getting warmed up. Tony, Silvio Dante, Johnny Sack, Uncle Junior, Christopher Moltisanti, Paulie Walnuts, and Dr. Melfi—a cast of thugs and enablers such as these, is the only government you have now or ever will have in the United States of America.

Or as Don Henley might say, "Offer up your best defense, this is the end of the innocence."

[This article was originally titled "Godfather Government: The Sopranos Aren't Leaving" and was published at From The Wilderness in 2006. The current posting has been updated and revised.--CB]

The totalitarian streak in the US

During the Cold War, the economies and cultures of the two great protagonists were not that different. The US adopted a "totalitarian" mobilization of resources to win the struggle. The fragmentation of US society today, the departure from the healthy "semi-totalitarian" arrangements of the 1930s-1950s, makes the US increasingly unable to prevail in any new struggle.

Central Asia
Mar 1, 2007

COMMENT
By Dmitry Shlapentokh

Russian President Vladimir Putin's speech at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy was among the very few of his speeches that have attracted world attention. Putin attacked the West, mostly the United States, and the strength of his speech led a number of Russian and Western observers to believe that Russia and the US have engaged in a new cold war. But a close analysis indicates that neither Russia nor the US actually has such plans.

The hedonistic and corrupt Russian elite who keep their capital in US dollars and euros - and who would gladly discard friendly Belarus because it demands cheaper oil - hardly are in a confrontational mood. But while this point is too apparent to be discussed, the possibility of the US engaging in a new cold war requires further scrutiny.

The Cold War has been studied for a long time, and quite a few pundits have promulgated it as a mortal struggle between "communists" and "capitalists", with ideology the key. This explanation does not account for the actual US-communist military alliance in China, starting with US president Richard Nixon's 1972 visit.

Another approach notes the small difference between the US and the USSR in geopolitical posture, suggesting that the Cold War was not so much an ideological conflict as a traditional power struggle between two empires. But the similarities, usually ignored, between the US and the USSR go much deeper and are related to socioeconomic and political practices. It is the US totalitarian streak that made it possible for the US to stand against the Soviet Union.

The Cold War evolved not just from World War II but from the entire socioeconomic culture of the 20th century. Modern war is a long exercise that puts pressure on all aspects of society and requires massive government engagement in both political and economic life. It requires emphasis on the "real" economy - production of goods, not profitability (mostly the interests of private shareholders), and even less what is called "service", the foundation of the economic "bubbles" of today.

It requires a socioeconomic discipline where the state's interests are paramount but there is a broad social-security net. The rudiments of this system emerged in various European states during World War I, with no Marxist or Bolshevik influence after 1917. The Great Depression reactivated the trend and led to the rise of states with many similarities with totalitarian regimes; Franklin D Roosevelt's USA was one of them.

Especially in the left and liberal American mind, there were two Roosevelts. One was the benign president who started a policy that would be developed by liberals and the left: regulation of financial institutions, subsidies for agriculture, the minimum wage, Social Security. The other was a madman who made "mistakes" such as sending hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans of Japanese descent to camps.

But this was one Roosevelt, and his policy was similar to that of other totalitarian rulers of the era. Indeed, the Nazis had a centralized economy, discarded profits for "real" production, and engaged in long-term planning for permanent war. They also combined repression, not just for outsiders but for insiders - ethnic Germans - with an increasing safety net for a majority of the people.

The vast majority of Western pundits would proclaim that the masses demonstrate special vigor fighting for regimes that guarantee "liberties". But the opposite is true. It is not regimes of Western liberal "liberties" - the policemen of property that have little or no interest in the well-being of the majority - but regimes that play the role of a tough but protective parent who, regardless of abuses, would never abandon its "children". This feeling pushed the army of the Reich to the suburbs of Moscow; the same feeling pushed Russian and American soldiers to Berlin.

The basic socioeconomic arrangements of World War II survived during the Cold War era. In the US, the state continued to be actively engaged in economic arrangements. Business emphasis was on the "real" economy and continuous, actually planned, improvement of quality of goods. This continued to be combined with continuous state control and harsh repression; in fact, McCarthyism was not much different from Stalinist policies. The same "totalitarian" streaks in US political/economic culture provided the state with the support and dedication of the majority. This made it possible to sustain the bloody Korean War and a range of crises and plans for generations ahead to stand against Soviet pressure.

The very similarities between socioeconomic elements of the United States and the Soviet Union provided the US the strength to confront its major Cold War adversary. But the collapse of the USSR was seen not as a great lottery win with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev but as a legitimate reward for the differences between the US and the USSR, not the similarities.

So the aspects that made the US similar to the USSR and 1930s-1950s America were discarded or minimized. And this makes the repetition of the Cold War, the generation-old conflict that required the exertion of efforts of an entire nation, impossible.

Most clear is the virtual disappearance of long-term planning and often the ignoring of actual results. Energy self-sufficiency has been regarded as essential for geopolitical/economic viability. But practically nothing is done about it despite years of talk. Concern with "real" production has almost disappeared.

The struggling automobile industry, a cornerstone of America's "real" economy, tries design, promotion campaigns, reduction of workforce and, of course, pressure on the government to protect it from "unfair competition". No real effort is made toward mass production of cars whose "real" characteristics would make them competitive.

Nor has there been planning to improve the quality or quantity of goods in most other segments of the economy. The emphasis is not on production but on profit, which could rise even if production declined. The stress is not on long-term planning but on immediate gratification, a stockbroker mentality, and rewards or punishment for playing with stock "bubbles". In fact, the rise and fall of stock "bubbles" are often unrelated to actual production.

This emphasis has also produced a US society with group but not national interests, where concern for the majority of the poor is ignored not just by the Republican right but by the liberal left. In fact, the attempt to change "affirmative action" preferential treatment based on race and gender to a policy based on low income is constantly rejected by the left as well as the right. The reason is simple: "affirmative action" benefits mostly middle-to-upper-class blacks and females; a change would benefit the poor and lower-middle classes regardless of race.

The fragmentation of US society, the departure from the healthy "semi-totalitarian" arrangements of the 1930s-1950s, makes the country increasingly unable to withstand a prolonged "cold war" struggle, either in the economy - consider the precipitous decline of competitiveness of US industrial goods despite the decline of the dollar vis-a-vis major currencies or even the "wooden ruble" - or in military affairs.

National stamina for a long conflict continues to decline, from the World War II victory with 300,000 combat deaths; the Korean War, a stalemate with about 38,000 losses; the Vietnam War defeat, with about 50,000 losses; to the present Iraq war, clearly moving to defeat, with only 3,000 losses and a mercenary army increasingly absorbing in its ranks anyone it can attract, including ex-criminals.

Carl von Clausewitz rightly noted a strong correlation between internal and foreign policy. Indeed, US survival in the Cold War was possible only because it accepted the enemy's socioeconomic arrangements - state involvement in economic activity; concern with real production more than profit; combining toughness and repressiveness with a broad security net not for "minorities" but for the majority of the poor; and, above all, planning for a generations-long economic and military struggle. None of these elements can be found in the present US, which is based on social fragmentation and a "bubble" economy of financial speculation and stock-market games.

This does not mean that the enemies of the US should be pleased. The "bubble economy" has produced a "stock-market war" - a war of quick and reckless adventures in which all available "cash" can be used for the mirage of a quick geopolitical profit, even if this "cash" is nuclear weapons. In fact, in sharp contrast with the calculating foreign policy of the Cold War era, the present elite - like many on Wall Street - preach the motto "shoot first, think later".

Dmitry Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of history, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend. He is author of East Against West: The First Encounter - The Life of Themistocles, 2005.

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.

It could happen here

In an excerpt from his new book, Salon's columnist explains why, for the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon, Americans have reason to doubt the future of their democracy.

By Joe Conason

Feb. 19, 2007 | Can it happen here? Is it happening here already? That depends, as a recent president might have said, on what the meaning of "it" is.

To Sinclair Lewis, who sardonically titled his 1935 dystopian novel "It Can't Happen Here," "it" plainly meant an American version of the totalitarian dictatorships that had seized power in Germany and Italy. Married at the time to the pioneering reporter Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Berlin by the Nazis a year earlier and quickly became one of America's most outspoken critics of fascism, Lewis was acutely aware of the domestic and foreign threats to American freedom. So often did he and Thompson discuss the crisis in Europe and the implications of Europe's fate for the Depression-wracked United States that, according to his biographer, Mark Schorer, Lewis referred to the entire topic somewhat contemptuously as "it."

If "it" denotes the police state American-style as imagined and satirized by Lewis, complete with concentration camps, martial law, and mass executions of strikers and other dissidents, then "it" hasn't happened here and isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

For contemporary Americans, however, "it" could signify our own more gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule. That is why Lewis's darkly funny but grim fable of an authoritarian coup achieved through a democratic election still resonates today -- along with all the eerie parallels between what he imagined then and what we live with now.

For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment.

Such foreboding, which would have been dismissed as paranoia not so long ago, has been intensified by the unfolding crisis of political legitimacy in the capital. George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold. He has announced that he intends to continue exercising power according to his claim of a mandate that erases the separation and balancing of power among the branches of government, frees him from any real obligation to obey laws passed by Congress, and permits him to ignore any provisions of the Bill of Rights that may prove inconvenient.

Whether his fellow Americans understand exactly what Bush is doing or not, his six years in office have created intense public anxiety. Much of that anxiety can be attributed to fear of terrorism, which Bush has exacerbated to suit his own purposes -- as well as to increasing concern that the world is threatened by global warming, pandemic diseases, economic insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and other perils with which this presidency cannot begin to cope.

As the midterm election showed, more and more Americans realize that something has gone far wrong at the highest levels of government and politics -- that Washington's one-party regime had created a daily spectacle of stunning incompetence and dishonesty. Pollsters have found large majorities of voters worrying that the country is on the wrong track. At this writing, two of every three voters give that answer, and they are not just anxious but furious. Almost half are willing to endorse the censure of the president.

Suspicion and alienation extend beyond the usual disgruntled Democrats to independents and even a significant minority of Republicans. A surprisingly large segment of the electorate is willing to contemplate the possibility of impeaching the president, unappetizing though that prospect should be to anyone who can recall the destructive impeachment of Bush's predecessor.

The reasons for popular disenchantment with the Republican regime are well known -- from the misbegotten, horrifically mismanaged war in Iraq to the heartless mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In both instances, growing anger over the damage done to the national interest and the loss of life and treasure has been exacerbated by evidence of bad faith -- by lies, cronyism, and corruption.

Everyone knows -- although not everyone necessarily wishes to acknowledge -- that the Bush administration misled the American people about the true purposes and likely costs of invading Iraq. It invented a mortal threat to the nation in order to justify illegal aggression. It has repeatedly sought, from the beginning, to exploit the state of war for partisan advantage and presidential image management. It has wasted billions of dollars, and probably tens of billions, on Pentagon contractors with patronage connections to the Republican Party.

Everyone knows, too, that the administration dissembled about the events leading up to the destruction of New Orleans. Its negligence and obliviousness in the wake of the storm were shocking, as was its attempt to conceal its errors. It has yet to explain why a person with few discernible qualifications, other than his status as a crony and business associate of his predecessor, was directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. By elevating ethically dubious, inexperienced, and ineffectual management the administration compromised a critical agency that had functioned brilliantly during the Clinton administration.

To date, however, we do not know the full dimensions of the scandals behind Iraq and Katrina, because the Republican leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives abdicated the traditional congressional duties of oversight and investigation. It is due to their dereliction that neither the president nor any of his associates have seemed even mildly chastened in the wake of catastrophe. With a single party monopolizing power yet evading responsibility, there was nobody with the constitutional power to hold the White House accountable.

Bolstered by political impunity, especially in a time of war, perhaps any group of politicians would be tempted to abuse power. But this party and these politicians, unchecked by normal democratic constraints, proved to be particularly dangerous. The name for what is wrong with them -- the threat embedded within the Bush administration, the Republican congressional leadership, and the current leaders of the Republican Party -- is authoritarianism.

The most obvious symptoms can be observed in the regime's style, which features an almost casual contempt for democratic and lawful norms; an expanding appetite for executive control at the expense of constitutional balances; a reckless impulse to corrupt national institutions with partisan ideology; and an ugly tendency to smear dissent as disloyalty. The most troubling effects are matters of substance, including the suspension of traditional legal rights for certain citizens; the imposition of secrecy and the inhibition of the free flow of information; the extension of domestic spying without legal sanction or warrant; the promotion of torture and other barbaric practices, in defiance of American and international law; and the collusion of government and party with corporate interests and religious fundamentalists.

What worries many Americans even more is that the authoritarians can excuse their excesses as the necessary response to an enemy that every American knows to be real. For the past five years, the Republican leadership has argued that the attacks of September 11, 2001 -- and the continuing threat from jihadist groups such as al Qaeda -- demand permanent changes in American government, society, and foreign policy. Are those changes essential to preserve our survival -- or merely useful for unscrupulous politicians who still hope to achieve permanent domination by their own narrowly ideological party? Not only liberals and leftists, but centrists, libertarians, and conservatives, of every party and no party, have come to distrust the answers given by those in power.

The most salient dissent to be heard in recent years, and especially since Bush's reelection in 2004, has been voiced not by the liberals and moderates who never trusted the Republican leadership, but by conservatives who once did.

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, who served as one of the managers of the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the House of Representatives, has joined the American Civil Liberties Union he once detested. In the measures taken by the Bush administration and approved by his former colleagues, Barr sees the potential for "a totalitarian type regime." Paul Craig Roberts, a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal and a former Treasury official under Reagan, perceives the "main components of a police state" in the Bush administration's declaration of plenary powers to deny fundamental rights to suspected terrorists. Bruce Fein, who served as associate attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, believes that the Bush White House is "a clear and present danger to the rule of law," and that the president "cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses." Syndicated columnist George Will accuses the administration of pursuing a "monarchical doctrine" in its assertion of extraordinary war powers.

In the 2006 midterm election, disenchanted conservatives joined with liberals and centrists to deliver a stinging rebuke to the regime by overturning Republican domination in both houses of Congress. For the first time since 1994, Democrats control the Senate and the House of Representatives. But the Democratic majority in the upper chamber is as narrow as possible, depending on the whims of Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a Republican-leaning Democrat elected on an independent ballot line, who has supported the White House on the occupation of Iraq, abuse of prisoners of war, domestic spying, the suspension of habeas corpus, military tribunals, far-right judicial nominations, and other critical constitutional issues. Nor is Lieberman alone among the Senate Democrats in his supine acquiescence to the abuses of the White House.

Even if the Democrats had won a stronger majority in the Senate, it would be naive to expect that a single election victory could mend the damage inflicted on America's constitutional fabric during the past six years. While the Bush administration has enjoyed an extraordinary immunity from Congressional oversight until now, the deepest implication of its actions and statements, as explored in the pages that follow, is that neither legislators nor courts can thwart the will of the unitary executive. When Congress challenges that presidential claim, as inevitably it will, then what seems almost certain to follow is not "bipartisanship" but confrontation. The election of 2006 was not an end but another beginning.

The question that we face in the era of terror alerts, religious fundamentalism, and endless warfare is whether we are still the brave nation preserved and rebuilt by the generation of Sinclair Lewis -- or whether our courage, and our luck, have finally run out. America is not yet on the verge of fascism, but democracy is again in danger. The striking resemblance between Buzz Windrip [the demagogic villain of Lewis's novel] and George W. Bush and the similarity of the political forces behind them is more than a literary curiosity. It is a warning on yellowed pages from those to whom we owe everything.

From "It Can Happen Here" by Joe Conason. Copyright (c) 2007 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press.

National Socialism and National Greatness

Posted by Justin Raimondo on February 05, 2007

In the Museum of Discarded Notions and Laughable Nostrums, surely the concept of “national greatness” deserves a special place. It was all the rage in neoconservative circles circa 1997, when David Brooks, then an editorialist for the Weekly Standard, penned his ode to the sense of “grandeur” and America’s imperial greatness as embodied, he thought, in the Library of Congress building. With its golden curlicues, and overly ornate projection of self-importance, and ideological symbolism, this structure represented, for Brooks, the spirit of an American past that had, by the 1990s, been nearly exhausted:

“The designers of the Library of Congress, like so many of their countrymen, thought America was on the verge of its own golden age. At the dawn of the 20th century, America was to take its turn at global supremacy. It was America’s task to take the grandeur of past civilizations, modernize it, and democratize it. This common destiny would unify diverse Americans and give them a great national purpose.”

With the end of the cold war, and the absence of any overwhelming threat to American national security, this great national purpose had shrunk to something no more impressive than, as Francis Fukuyama, the neocons’ former philosopher-in-residence, put it, “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

We had reached, said Fukuyama, “the end of history,” which, he averred, “will be a very sad time” because “the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” will be replaced by such mundane matters as earning a living, recycling old wine bottles, and the eternal problem of keeping both wife and mistress happy. The age of heroism is past, and from now on our task will merely be the “endless care-taking of the museum of human history” and “centuries of boredom.”

Without any wars to fight, you see, or any causes requiring the spilling of copious amounts of blood, your archetypal neocon is bored—not that these typically soft, physically incapable, often dwarfish and invariably pear-shaped policy wonks would ever consider personally fighting for any of these noble causes, mind you: Their role is to instigate the wars, it is for others to fight them. War, for the neocon, is strictly a spectator sport, rather than a hands-on business. However, the very idea of a world without any really serious conflicts struck them as the ultimate in ennui, although at the end of his “end of history” essay, Fukuyama was hope that “perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

He was right about history getting started again, albeit not in the manner he or anyone else anticipated: the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon put the neocons back in business again, opening up, as it did, a new world fresh with possibilities of conflict.

The end of the Soviet empire had made their cachet as ex-Commies—which imbued them with an aura of expertise, and gained them easy entry to the then-booming field of Kremlinology—obsolescent, and deprived the world of its Manichean gloss. Post-9/11, what Fukuyama termed “the worldwide ideological struggle” was revived, albeit with an Islamic-Arabic adversary rather than a Slavic one. Once again, the cry went up: “To the barricades!” And its echoes were heard from Washington to Tel Aviv.

Instead of building monuments to our global supremacy, and devoting ourselves to the endless caretaking of the museum of human history, we could once again get back to the noblest cause of them all—war. And not any ordinary war, but a “War on Terrorism” —a war without end. Oh, for joy! History was back —with a vengeance.

The neocon response to this was to develop a new ideology; or, rather, to distill and perfect their old ideology—warmed over Social Democratic nostrums combined with a merciless devotion to the cult of Ares —that has morphed, in its later stages, into what might be categorized, without a whole lot of Procrustean maneuvering, as a variant of fascism. The contempt for the “bourgeois” virtues, as given expression by Senor Fukuyama, the longing for the heroic, the valorization of death for the sake of an abstraction —these “aristocratic” virtues, as Fukuyama characterized them, are back in vogue, along with the cult of militarism, the idea of Big Government, and the revival of genuinely authoritarian impulses in the West.

That these impulses were manifesting themselves among rightist intellectuals, rather than nesting exclusively on the left, as in the past, was merely a function of the neoconservative mindset, which is as much a history as it is an ideology. Many of the leading neocons, after all, had been leftists, usually of the Trotskyist variety, and retained the universalist-totalitarian frame of reference long after abandoning left-sectarian politics. Neoconservatism, in an important sense, is merely Trotskyism turned inside out. Instead of exporting the “world socialist revolution,” they are intent on spreading what George W. Bush described as the “global democratic revolution.” And they do it with the same revolutionary fervor that they —or their intellectual ancestors —once hailed the Red Army and its founder.

On domestic matters, historically, the neocons have been all over the map: their one true and abiding belief is in the liberating power of American military might. With the implosion of the Leninist project, and the apparent “end of history,” the neocons were essentially put out of business — until the worst terrorist attack in American history revived their fervor, and their fortunes. And this marked yet another milestone in their long odyssey from Marxism to a new kind of authoritarianism on the right.

I hesitate to use the far too often abused term “fascism,” which has been used to describe everyone to any opponent of the New Left during the 1960s to anyone who opposed U.S. entry into World War II. The Communists, during the “third period” of the 1930s, routinely describe the Social Democrats as “social fascists,” and this has been a favorite term of abuse employed by the neocons to smear anyone who crosses their path. Yes, even I, a libertarian, i.e., one who believes that the best government is no government, have been so described, by no less an authority than David Horowitz’s Frontpage.

Yet there is such an ideology as fascism, historically speaking, and its main themes are being revived in contemporary neoconservative ideology to a chilling degree. Aside from the fin-de-siecle romanticism of Fukuyama’s pining for a rebirth of history, the neocons have replicated most if not all of the classic symptoms of the fascist mindset, if not quite yet generated all the characteristics of fascism in power. No, we don’t have a single-party state, which is the central organizational principle of fascist ideology. But that’s only because the neocons have yet to seize total power, and sweep away the last vestiges of constitutional democracy. However, they lack none of the telltale symptoms of fascists out of power, that is, of aspiring authoritarians..

The essence of neoconservatism is war and the valorization of conflict, and, as such, seems tailor made for the post-9/11 era. To the early fascist theoreticians, and the first successful fascist politician, Mussolini, war was the noblest cause of them all, not merely a necessity but a sacred obligation. Acts of war were, for the fascists, acts of worship: Ares replaced Zeus in the fascist Olympus. The one true abiding faith of the fascists was in the efficacy of military force as a means to shape society, and this militarism dominated every aspect of fascist society, which was built around war and preparations for war. Mussolini sought to recreate the Roman Empire —an ambition shared by neoconservative columnist and military maven Max Boot, whose “The Case for An American Empire” lays out the American claim to the imperial purple.

The faith of the neocons in the ability of the American military to “transform” the Middle East, and create Jeffersonian republics where before there had been nothing but tyranny and grinding poverty, is surely a mystical phenomenon, just as surely and frankly religious as faith-healing or Christian Science. Whereas the foreign policy of a constitutional republic is necessarily limited to the defense of the nation and its interests, a nation that declared its foreign policy goal to be “benevolent global hegemony”—as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan put it in their 1996 foreign policy manifesto — is a creature of a different type. It is surely not a republic, in any meaningful sense of the term, but an empire: perhaps even an evil empire, for all its “benevolent” pretensions. Not since the fascist and national socialist movements of the 1930s had any mass political movement put forward a program of world conquest as a political goal.

The ideal fascist model was Sparta —a warrior nation geared for conquest, in a permanent state of mobilization for war. For the fascist, life is war, nations are necessarily always in conflict, and this inevitable clash of interests must always in end war —and in the victory of one over the other. This worldview is mirrored in the endless “war on terrorism,” which our rulers promise us will last at least a generation. Perpetual war, as far as the eye can see —this is the core doctrine of neoconservatism, and the animating spirit of classical fascist movements, as well as German national socialism.

War abroad means an atmosphere of conformity and hostility to dissent on the home front, and this has translated, in contemporary neoconservative thought, to the equation of antiwar sentiment with treason. In his infamous smear attack on paleoconservative and libertarian critics of the Iraq invasion, David Frum, the neocon Vyshinsky, attacked yours truly, as well as an entire platoon of antiwar right-wingers, as “unpatriotic conservatives.” On a lower level, where neocon ideology meets talk radio and Fox News, we have Sean Hannity howling “Enemy of the State” at war critics and dissenters from the neocon party line. Like classic fascist movements of the past, neoconservatism today values and promotes uniformity of thought, and seeks to enforce intellectual homogeneity with strictures equating dissent with treason. Andrew Sullivan, a leading warmonger and neocon shill, infamously accused a “fifth column” on “both coasts” with not so secretly sympathizing with Osama bin Laden and other enemies of America. On a cruder level, we have the rantings of David Horowitz, who routinely accuses his political opponents of being in league with the terrorists, either consciously or “objectively,” as the Marxists used to say.

Conservatism used to mean anti-statism. Today, under the rubric of neoconservatism, this has been stood on its head. It is a Bizarro World conservatism, where the individualism of Barry Goldwater and Frank S. Meyer has given way to the militarized groupthink of David Frum and the Dittohead demagoguery of Rush Limbaugh. From The Conscience of a Conservative [.pdf] (or, perhaps, A Choice, Not an Echo) to An End to Evil is a long way to travel: it has been a long way downward, but it seems today’s ostensible “conservatives,” committed as they are to what is rapidly becoming an openly fascist movement, are finally scraping rock bottom.

Racism is not necessarily related to fascism, yet the example of German national socialism makes the connection inevitable. And here, too, there are ominous parallels. Neoconservatism, like Nazism, has its “Other,” it’s equivalent of the Eternal Jew, and that is the Eternal Arab. A great deal of how the neocons see the Arab and Muslim worlds is rooted in a brazenly racist mindset, exemplified in the writings of Raphael Patai, whose book, The Arab Mind, reportedly had a large influence in official Bush administration circles, as well as among neoconservatives outside the government. As Seymour Hersh pointed out in his investigation into the horrors of Abu Ghraib:

“The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind, a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. ‘The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,’ Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, ‘or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.’ The Patai book, an academic told me, was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.’ In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged —’one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.’"

Torture as a political act, the central theme of a propaganda campaign, is something we must surely associate with fascist movements. Furthermore, to single out persons of a particular ethnicity or religion —in this case, Arabs and Muslims —is so evocative of the National Socialist German Workers Party that one has to wonder if it’s intentional. That the neoconservatives are now carrying the pro-torture banner is a major milestone is their journey to a peculiarly Americanized form of fascism.

In terms of ideology and policy, as well as in style and spirit, the post-9/11 neoconservative movement exhibits all the classic characteristics of a genuinely fascist phenomenon: militarism, leader worship, intellectual authoritarianism, delusions of “national greatness,” hatred of the Other, the romanticization of violence, and a program of permanent war. All that is lacking is a one-party state —and we are, perhaps, a major terrorist attack away from that.

Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is Editorial Director of Antiwar.com.

How Mass-Murderers "Take Responsibility"

Dec 12, 2006

It's the same with Right-wing authoritarians everywhere.

They're victims. Even if they've killed thousands and "disappeared" hundreds of thousands.

They're persecuted. Even if their "enemies" hold zero power.

Augusto Pinochet, former dictator of Chile who overthrew democratically elected "Leftist" Dr. Salvador Allende in a Right-wing military coup that was backed by the CIA, shortly before his untimely death on Sunday at the age of 91 (too soon for a war crimes trial) stepped forward to "take responsibility" -- but that doesn't mean he "showed remorse."

And Pinochet's wife read a message that

the former dictator held "no grudge against anyone," despite all the "persecutions and injustices" against him.

Pinochet's method of taking responsibility -- for the disappearances & torture & murder of thousands of Chilean citizens -- is to engage in a campaign of attempting to justify his actions as "defensive."

Despite Pinochet's multi-thousands of dead & tortured victims, it's Pinochet who is "persecuted."

Sound familiar?

Pinochet had spent years dodging extradition & dodging trials & dodging justice, but shortly before his death was on the attack.

We should learn about authoritarians like the Cheneys and the Boltons and the Scalias of this world by observing Pinochet's deathbed behavior.

Pinochet "took responsibility," but it was the liberals' fault. He was "forced" to torture & kill thousands, and disappear hundreds of thousands.

Ain't it a hoot.

Do Right-wing authoritarians around the world have some sort of Universal Playbook?

How many examples of this must we see, before we detect a pattern?

How shall we count the examples of this strategy of "Remorse Via Justification" of the Right-wing purveyors of "America's Moral Values"?

"Today, near the end of my days," said General Pinochet, "I want to say that I harbor no rancor against anybody, that I love my fatherland above all and that I take political responsibility for everything that was done which had no other goal than making Chile greater and avoiding its disintegration," he said in a statement read aloud by his wife as he sat by her side. "I assume full political responsibility for what happened."

"Fatherland" and "Heimat" and other such manipulative language aside, the good General never meant to hurt anybody, you see.

He also sent "a message of support to my comrades in arms, many of whom are imprisoned, suffering persecution and revenge," a clear reference to the scores of military officers facing trials, initiated since the restoration of democratic rule, for human rights abuses.
"It is not fair to demand punishment for those who prevented the continuation and worsening of the worst political and economic crisis that one can remember," he added.

Chile's "worst political and economic crisis" was... a depression? A war? No, it was a democratically-elected physician who nationalized the copper mines, and in retaliation from the wealthy classes was hit with a general strike (which, like the 2003 Venezuelan general strike, didn't work in the oligarchs' favor) in a bid to destabilize Allende's presidency.

Canada nationalized its health care system and has a nationalized oil company called "PetroCanada." Does this mean Canada is Marxist and should be overthrown, its citizens rounded-up and tortured and exterminated?

Even so, Pinochet felt strongly that the mass-murder of thousands was justified -- using the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile as a concentration camp for torture & execution, the secret disappearances of hundreds of thousands more, the mass graves, and innumerable other atrocities.

I hear the echo of Pinochetism in the defenses of Right-wing authoritarians from Oliver North to Dick Cheney to Alberto Gonzales.

I hear the echo of Pinochetism in the defenses of Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton & Antonin Scalia.

I foresee no surcease of U.S. Pinochetism until its natural conclusion. Because most refuse to acknowledge it's actually happening and prefer to quash discussion with "Tin Foil Hat" charges.

Allende's niece, Isabel Allende, disagrees, and warns that the U.S. could be headed for a Chile-style showdown if the U.S. doesn't heed Chile's lessons.

But we all can see the examples of Pinochetism here at home.

The psychology is plain and clear and abundant.

Perhaps you have some examples to add.

--By by judasdisney

New Signing Statement: "Democrat Party Victory not Binding"

Nov 21, 2006

On Friday, President Bush kept the nation in business by siging a temporary resolution to continue funding the government until Congress approves new spending:


Bush Signs Bill To Fund Government Agencies Through Dec. 8

HANOI -(Dow Jones)- With lawmakers still working on 10 appropriations bills for fiscal 2007, U.S. President George W. Bush signed a resolution into law that will keep government agencies running through Dec. 8. Dow Jones

But in a little known addendum to that resolution, President Bush issued a signing statement regarding the recent congressional elections:


"The executive branch shall construe the recent congressional elections in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President as Commander in Chief. The election of the Democrat Party will not hinder the Executive from protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks. This will assist in achieving the shared goals of the Executive and the American people who desire freedom." La Prensa Kostina

Sorry Dems, you thought you won an election? Pshaw! The Executive doesn't recognize you!

We all wondered what Rove and Bush had planned now that they will no longer have the stamp of approval from the Rubberstamp Republican Congress. Now we know! The Administration simply will not recognize the new Congress!

"We've reviewed the Constitution and we feel our case is a strong one," said Presidential Spokesman Tony Snow. "The Democrat Party can either continue to be obstructionsists, or they can join with President Bush and the American people in moving the country in the right direction. La Prensa Kostina

That would explain why they've just announced new plans for a $125,000,000 Detention Center in Guantanamo, Cuba.
That would explain why Bush is putting up the same rejected nominees for the courts.

That would explain why Bush announced before the elections that he's going to reintroduce cuts to and privitazation of Social Security in the last 2 years of his term.

That would explain Bush's plan to re-nominate John Bolton to the United Nations.

That would explain why Bush decided to make his own study group insteaad of listen to the bipartisan commission's recommendations on getting out of Iraq.

That would explain Bush's appointment of a Contraception foe to head contraception programs!

That would explain Bush's arrogance in saying "that's not going to happen" when asked before the elections how he would work with a Democratic Speaker Pelosi.

He's not going to.

And it's so much easier this way.


--By bentliberal@yahoo.com